August 1, 2007
ITALIAN HORROR FILM MAESTRO CELEBRATED IN COLORFUL BIO
Career of influential cult director Mario Bava
becomes
the work of a lifetime by noted genre expert
Tim Lucas
"Tim Lucas has devoted himself to getting the word out about
Bava's greatness," writes film director Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas,
The Departed) in his Introduction to Mario Bava All the Colors
of the Dark (Video Watchdog), "[and] this book is the pinnacle of his
efforts."
Indeed, in this massive new critical biography -- the product
of interviews with more than 100 colleagues, friends and family members,
and 32 years in the making -- Lucas explores in unprecedented
detail the life and legacy of one of the most original, influential, and
secretive filmmakers of the 20th century.
Best known as the maestro of many aggressively
cinematic, candy-colored Italian horror and fantasy films (Black
Sunday, Black Sabbath, Danger: Diabolik), Mario Bava
spent the first twenty years of his career as one of Italy's leading
cinematographers, during which time he was helped to cultivate the screen
personas of such actors as Aldo Fabrizi, Gina Lollobrigida, and Steve Reeves.
He was literally present at the beginning of each new form of cinema
native to his country, from operettas to neorealism to sword and sandal movies
to Spaghetti Westerns. Most importantly, he was the principal visionary behind
the Golden Age of Italian fantasy, which lasted from 1957 until his death in
1980.
Now, for the first time in any language, Lucas explores Bava's
first two decades of cinematographic achievement, as well as his next two
decades as a director whose work has been acknowledged as a major influence by
such filmmakers as Scorsese, Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino, Joe Dante, and
Guillermo del Toro. In the course of his research, Lucas discovered that
Bava often contributed uncredited direction, photography or special effects to
the films of friends in need, and provides entire chapters of documentation
elucidating this "Secret Filmography." Also included is the story of
Mario's father and mentor Eugenio Bava, a silent film cameraman and the father
of Italian special effects, who rose from contributing set decoration
to Pathe Frères shorts to photographing Quo Vadis?, from creating
special effects for Cabiria to an executive wartime position in
Mussolini's film factory, the Istituto LUCE. The cumulative result is not just
the story of "the supreme visual poet of the Italian gothic cinema" (The
Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror), but a century-long family saga that
occupies the first hundred years of Italian popular cinema -- a
history not previously explored in English in such
detail.
A staggering, 12-pound labor of love, interweaving biography,
history and criticism, Mario Bava All the Colors of the Dark
consists of 1128 pages of four-columned type (nearly 800,000 words!), fully
illustrated with well over 1000 stills and annotated poster art from all over
the world, most in full color and all subjected to a three-year process of
meticulous digital restoration. Included are never-before-published family
photos, documents, and drawings by Bava himself, and an eye-popping array
of images that Bava fans never expected to see: a wealth
of color shots taken on the set of the B&W classic Black
Sunday, the only photos taken of Catherine Deneuve while briefly cast as
the female lead in Danger: Diabolik, and dozens of pictures of the
notoriously camera-shy director himself. The extensive appendices include
filmographies for Mario and Eugenio Bava, international discography and
videography, name and film title indexes, and a generous gallery of storyboard
art by Bava, including his complete art for an unproduced 1970s project,
Baby Kong.
With an Introduction by Martin Scorsese and a
Foreword by the late Italian director Riccardo Freda, Mario Bava All the
Colors of the Dark marks an exciting new development in the fields of
film-related biography and book-making. Simply to page through this remarkable
tome, as overpoweringly visual as any of Bava's own films, is to feel like
you're watching an epic film.
Mario Bava All the Colors of the Dark is
available from Video Watchdog at www.bavabook.com.
Video Watchdog, PO Box 5283, Cincinnati OH 45205-0283,
www.videowatchdog.com,
1-800-275-8395 or 513-297-1855.
Hardcover, clothbound, gold stamping on front and
spine
Dimensions in inches: 10.85w x 11.87h x 2.63d
Dimensions in
centimeters: 27.6w x 30.1h x 6.7d
Full-color French-fold laminated dust
jacket
Full-color endpapers
1128 Glossy, full-color pages
Binding:
stitched, extra-reinforced, roundback
12 lbs (5.45
kgs)
ISBN: 0-9633756-1-X
ADVANCE PRAISE
"Exhaustive, perceptive... This book deserves a place on the
bookshelves of all serious film lovers." -- Martin Scorsese, director of
Goodfellas and The Departed
"It's absolutely mind-boggling! I don't know what Mario Bava
would have made of all this, but wherever he is, he must be blushing Technicolor
crimson... and very proud." -- Joe Dante, director of Gremlins and
The Howling
"No one knew the circles of Hell like Bava, and in Tim Lucas
we have found our perfect Virgil." -- Guillermo del Toro, director of Pan's
Labyrinth and Hellboy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Lucas is the editor and co-publisher of the award-winning
monthly Video Watchdog, The Perfectionist's Guide to Fantastic Video.
His articles, essays, and criticism have appeared in dozens of magazines in
America and abroad, including Film Comment, Cahiers du Cinema,
American Cinematographer, Fangoria and Cinefex.
He is also a published novelist (Throat Sprockets, The Book of
Renfield) and comics writer (Taboo), a DVD audio commentator,
an award-winning blogger (Video WatchBlog), and a monthly columnist for
the British magazine Sight and Sound.